Pierre Soulages was born on December 24, 1919 in Rodez and died on Wednesday October 26, 2022.
Very young he was attracted by Romanesque art and prehistory. He began to paint in this isolated province that contemporary artistic currents have not penetrated.
At 18, he went to Paris to prepare for the drawing professorship and the entrance exam to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He was admitted there but convinced of the mediocrity of the education received there refused to enter and immediately left for Rodez. During this brief stay in Paris he frequented the Louvre Museum, he saw exhibitions by Cézanne and Picasso which were revelations for him.
Mobilized in 1940, he was demobilized in 1941. Occupied Paris, he went to Montpellier and regularly visited the Fabre museum.
Montpellier in turn occupied, began a period of hiding for him to escape the STO during which he no longer painted.
It was not until 1946 that he could devote all his time to painting. He then settled in the suburbs of Paris. His paintings where black dominates are abstract and dark. They are immediately noticed as they differ from the semi-figurative and very colorful painting of the post-war period.
He found a workshop in Paris, rue Schoelcher, near Montparnasse. In 1948, he took part in exhibitions in Paris and in Europe, notably at “Französische abstrakte malerei” in several German museums. He is by far the youngest of this small group of painters which includes the first masters of abstract art, Kupka, Domela, Herbin, etc. The poster is made with one of his black and white paintings.
1949, personal exhibition in Paris, Lydia Conti gallery, and group exhibitions in New York, London, Sao-Paulo and Copenhagen.
From 1949 to 1952, production of three theater sets and ballets. First etchings at the Lacourière workshop.
Other group exhibitions presented in New York then travel to several American museums. This is the case with “Advancing French art” (1951), “Younger European artists” Guggenheim Museum (1953), and “The new Decade”, Museum of modern art (1955).
He exhibits regularly at the Kootz Gallery, New York, and later at the Galerie de France, Paris.
From the early 1950s, works acquired by the Phillips Gallery, Washington, the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Gallery, London, the national museum of modern art, Paris, the Museu de arte moderna, Rio-de Janeiro, etc… Today, Pierre Soulages is represented in more than 110 museums on all continents with more than 230 paintings.
1960, first retrospective exhibitions in the museums of Hanover, Essen, Zurich, The Hague.
1966-1968, several new retrospectives are devoted to his work, notably at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (1966) where for the first time he "tends" his canvases with steel cables, between floor and ceiling. In 1968 he created a ceramic wall with the Mégard workshop for a building in Pittsburgh.
In 1979 he exhibited at the MNAM - Center Georges Pompidou his first single-pigment paintings based on the reflection of light by the surface states of black. This pictorial light arising from the difference between two darknesses carries with it a great power of emotion and great possibilities of development, it will later be called "black-light" and "outrenoir".
From 1987 to 1994, he made the 104 stained glass windows of the abbey church of Conques.
Between 1994 and 1998, publication of the 3 volumes of the catalog raisonné “Soulages, complete work: paintings”, by Pierre Encrevé, Editions du Seuil, Paris.
Other works have appeared where rhythm, space and light are born from the violent contact of black and white on the entire surface of the canvas, another pictorial light.
He is the first living artist invited to exhibit at the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, then at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow (2001).
Attached to his native land, Soulages agrees, in 2005, with his wife Colette, to an exceptional donation to the Community of Greater Rodez: 500 pieces, including all the engraved work (etchings, lithographs, serigraphs), the preparatory work for the stained glass windows of Conques, paintings on canvas and on paper (a unique set, including gouaches, inks and walnut stains), documentation, books, photographs, films, correspondence...
In December 2012, Pierre Soulages and his wife make a new donation to the urban community of Grand Rodez: 14 new paintings covering the period from 1946 to 1986. A donation then estimated at 6.8 million euros which allows the museum Ruthenian to house almost all of the painter's works from very rare periods in the largest collection of Soulages in the world.
The Soulages Museum in Rodez was inaugurated in May 2014 with the opening of the first temporary exhibition “Outrenoir in Europe, museums and foundations”.